Fifth Front Cover Draft

This is my fifth draft. As you can tell, this is extremely similar to my first draft and most of my other drafts have consisted of experimentation with different themes and looks for my music magazine, but as I haven't found this to have worked. I have gone back to my original draft as I feel this looks the most professional and it represents my genre perfectly, especially with the background. The main changes I have made from my first draft to this is some of the font sizing and positioning of the headline and features. This shows I am capable of putting a lot of effort into my first draft and shows that as I work hard on drafts, not as many will be required in the future. Obviously, this one is still a draft so when I get some peer feedback for this I was make some changes to it before submitting my final draft.

Fourth Front Cover Draft

This the fourth draft of my music magazine. The significant difference from my last draft is that I reassembled the background previously used in my first and second draft. Like mentioned earlier, I did this because I felt the background was part of the magazine in a way that it contributed to the colour scheme and less features are needed if a great background is used as this the magazine much more depth, along with distinctively showing what genre of music my magazine is just by looking at it. I feel that adding more features will overwhelm the magazine cover and make it look very crowded and busy. Whereas the use of the background and less features makes the magazine very simple and elegant, which is what I'm aiming for with my magazine. The other significance is the new masthead, I added this in just for a test to see if this looked any better than the less. But now I have decided to change it back to my old masthead as I feel this masthead doesn't match the genre of music magazine as it looks more Rock/Punk due to the distorting design of it, rather than country.

Third Front Cover Draft

This is the third draft of my music magazine. The most significant difference I have made with this draft from my previous ones is the omission of the background. Since my first draft, I have used a background of a countryside that fits in with the photograph of the model and it distinctively showed what genre of music the magazine is based on. With this draft, I was curious to see what it would look like if I removed it and replaced it with a plain, white backdrop. I did this, and overall I am not particularly pleased with the outcome. The main reason being that the headline and features do not match. This is because the colours were mostly inspired by the background and not the model (with the exception of the light red from her lipstick) as I chose the outfit to compliment the backdrop I would be adding later on, as her outfit is very simple with not much colour. I know now, that a white background should only be used if the model's outfit or look contains at least 3 colours as they can be used for the colour scheme. Other changes I made to this draft was the sizing of the headline and features, I made them bigger than the previous draft but smaller than the first draft. I also changed the headline quote back to middle alignment as I felt this looked better and complimented the rest of the headline. 

Second Front Cover Draft

This is my second draft of my music magazine. The most significant difference I have made with this draft was my experimentation with different images to use for the main image for my music magazine. I chose this image as it is completely different to my other image in my previous draft. As this one is a medium-long shot and the previous one was a close up. Other differences I mad to this draft was making some of the featureless smaller as I felt they took up too much space in the previous draft. Overall, this draft has made me realize that using a medium-long shot was a bad idea as it gives the cover too much empty space and it just looks messy. Making the text smaller didn't help this either as it contributes to leaving more empty space. When making my third draft, I will change the photo back to the previous one to avoid the problem of too much empty space.

First Front Cover Draft

This is my first draft. Overall, I am extremely pleased with it as it conveys exactly what I visioned earlier on the the process of pre-production. For improvements for my next drafts, I feel that I could have spaced out my features a lot more and possibly rearrange them so they aren't interfering with the main image.

I took inspiration from this cover of Rolling Stone in many different ways;
The first being that I used a similar type of positioning for the masthead. I made sure it was at the top middle of the page with a bit being covered up by the model's head. I felt this compliments the cover the most as it fits in well with the page while a different position of the masthead would only make it look out of place.
I also used a similar idea as the small "The 2012 Hot List" feature. I liked this so much on the Rolling Stone magazine cover that I decided to create my own on Photoshop and put it on my magazine cover. Even though Rolling Stone is not a country magazine, I still felt this feature was just as appropriate to have on my magazine cover.

Country album covers: Inspiration and analysis

To further research into my chosen genre of country music for my magazine. I decided to choose a variety of album covers from current and established country artists. I analyse them briefly and pick out any conventions I have picked up that all of these covers share, which will help when I come to having my photo shoot for my double page spread.

Acoustic reader profile

Even though I have stated my target audience many times in the process of creating my magazine. I decided to take this one step further and create a reader profile for my music magazine. This way you can tell what age and gender readers are, as well as some facts on the average reader for Acoustic.